The high volume of passenger transport vehicles, in particular of cars, makes the management of parking space, above all in urban areas, very important. For the management of parking space, the key issues of which are the collection of parking fees, information about available parking space and monitoring of the payment of fees, systems for the management of parking zones are known that are automated to a greater or lesser extent. A parking zone is understood here to be a facility having multiple chargeable parking spaces for vehicles. Parking zones or parking areas occur in the form of usually privately-operated car parks or multi-storey car parks which as a rule have barrier-controlled entries and exits, or at or on public roads in the form of local-authority-managed parking ranks, parking bays, parking islands and such like.
A traffic management system, as is deployed in many cities, is known from the published application DE 43 20 918 A1. Here, the free parking spaces in multi-storey car parks and car parks are determined by working out the difference between the numbers of vehicles driving in and the numbers of vehicles driving out. Optimum routes to parking space which is not yet fully occupied are indicated on display boards in the approaches to the city centre or through transmission to individual navigation systems in the vehicles. In this way, a vehicle driver looking for parking space knows where he can still find a parking space and can head for this in a targeted manner, which greatly reduces the traffic looking for parking space.
The recording of free parking space in publicly accessible parking zones with automatic parking-ticket machines is more difficult to organize. Here the arrival time of a vehicle is known through the purchasing of the parking ticket, but not its precise departure time. DE 43 20 918 A1 discloses in this regard a recording device integrated in the automatic parking-ticket machine for recording the number of vehicles, by means of which device the current occupancy can be determined relatively precisely by allowing for a certain “redundancy”.
In this respect, a method is known from patent specification DE 197 20 415 C1 for determining a parking space occupancy in a publicly accessible parking zone in which parking in a parking-zone period is subject to a charge. An automatic parking-ticket machine assigned to the parking zone outputs parking tickets with a validity period corresponding to the anticipated parking time. The parking zone is integrated in a parking management system which comprises a central installation connected to the automatic parking-ticket machine and display devices connected to the central installation, which display devices give information about free parking zones for vehicle drivers looking for parking space. The parking-zone time is subdivided into time intervals to which a counter is assigned, the predetermined maximum value of which corresponds to the number of available parking spaces. At a predetermined point in time, the respective counter reading of all counters is set to zero. When the parking ticket is output, the counter reading of those counters whose assigned time interval is contained in the validity period of the parking ticket is increased by one. The current number of free parking spaces is determined by working out the difference of the counter reading for the current time interval and the maximum value of available parking spaces. However, this method features the uncertainty as to whether the validity period of the purchased parking ticket matches the actual period of occupancy of the parking space by a vehicle. It also remains uncertain precisely which of the available parking spaces of a parking zone is occupied or which is free.
The monitoring of whether a vehicle occupies a parking space for longer than the validity period of the purchased parking ticket is, as is known, a personnel-intensive process. Inspection personnel have to take stock of every parked vehicle in order to check whether a parking ticket was purchased at all or whether the validity period of the purchased parking ticket has expired.